Trump is the Don Quixote of our time!!
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” wrote the Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, Antonio Gramsci.
In his Prison Notebooks, during his imprisonment by Mussolini’s Fascist regime, he explained how the turbulent nature of societal transitions. It brings a case of fluidity; he calls it “interregnum,” a time when the established order is collapsing, but the new order has yet to emerge. During this period of uncertainty and instability, “monsters”, disruptive and destructive forces, emerge to fill the void. And in the case of Trump, the “monster” is a Knight Fool incompetent who wages wars against imaginary enemies. ;
Trump is more like Don Quixote, the fictitious character of the great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote (early 17th century), when Spain was undergoing a significant transformation and major Political and economic decline as a superpower, no longer the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe. Spain’s extensive empire and involvement in foreign wars drained its resources in the never-ending wars. Religious Intolerance: The Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition, established to enforce Catholicism and persecute those who did not convert (including Jews and Muslims), were significant aspects of Spanish society. Don Quixote reflects the Spanish society of the time, capturing the decline of Spain as a superpower and the disillusionment of its people. Don Quixote wanted to make Spain great again and bring back the culture of chivalry in Spain. This may explain the rise of Trump and Trumpism in America, the Don Quixote of Our Time. The disillusioned knight rides not on a horse but aboard a private jet trimmed in gold, given to him by an Arab prince, a Moor. He carries no javelin but brandishes tweets, lawsuits, and rally chants of disillusioned Americans as weapons. Trump, the disillusioned knight, acting in his reality TV show, Don Quixote, mistakes a barber’s basin for the legendary Helmet of Mambrino, Trump, wearing the MAGA hat wrapped in the illusion of self-doubt and ethnonationalism of populism, cheered on by the very crowds he exploits. Fighting an imaginary enemy here and abroad, Trump, Don Quixote, the loser who celebrates his delusional victories, his deluded chivalric misadventures, waged a war on imaginary enemies, immigrants, Muslims, the new Moors in the Middle East, based on his moral compass, regardless of reality around him. Trump, as modern Don Quixote, has his imagination of the world distort his reality, leading him to mistake windmills for giant Moors, as Iran’s nuclear sites (WMD). Trump is showing his detachment between his idealized view of himself and the mundane reality of his world, acts like a rich boy playing with his poops out of boredom, waging wars in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and Iran, spouting conspiracies, and swinging at shadows of his own invention. Start a war, then quickly end it; claims victory and celebrates triumphs where none exist, over pandemics, elections, and facts declare a false peace, where division is law and order, and insurrection is mistaken for unity. Like Cervantes’ tragic knight with a false narrative of America “made great again” while democratic institutions crumble, trust erodes, and the truth gets buried under spectacle, he confuses delusion with destiny, but unlike Don Quixote, Trump never awakens, and the golden knight rides again. Donald Trump, the self-declared savior of American honor and chivalry, dusts off his old, tired rhetoric and dashes toward a new frontier, demanding applause, instead of admitting mistakes and blunders, he edges for the next big adventure. Trump’s realist friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, the lord of the promised land, ever faithful, is modern Sancho Panza in a tailored suit with lots of bombs to spare. A canning peasant with the manners of a statesman, whispering war into the ear of his master, all while calculating how best to keep power and stay out of prison. Together, they ride toward Tehran, not to slay dragons, the Ayatollah, but to keep them in power few more years. Trump, writing a fictional American story, as Cervantes, sees himself on a holy quest to avenge American pride, to reclaim lost glory, to look great again, without needing to do great things. Don Quixote novel is a 1000-page novel, written in two books separated by 10 years; in the second book (term), when the Knight clergyman calls Don Quixote a fool and tells him that he has lost his mind, the distinction between reality and fantasy, advising him to return to sanity, instead of making himself a mockery of everyone. Don Quixote replies that it’s better to pursue these misadventures and be considered a fool than to abandon them and be a person lacking in moral principles. But this is no real crusade; this is a circus act with nuclear prizes. The question is: Are we watching it or taking part in it?
Ahmed Tharwat
Host/Producer of Arab American TV show BelAhdan
